Information about this scheme

Every year since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned a temporary summer pavilion by an international architect who has not yet completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation. The Serpentine Galleries make this project possible every year through private funding by individuals and entities that act as sponsors. For the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, BIG decided to work with one of the most basic elements of architecture: the brick wall. Rather than clay bricks or stone blocks – the wall is erected from pultruded fiberglass frames stacked on top of each other. The unzipping of the wall turns the line into a surface, transforming the wall into a space. The resulting design is a series of stacked Lay Light boxes which slide horizontally over cruciform aluminium profiles to create an interior cavity within the wall. The alternating overlaps as well as the movement and presence of people outside create a lively play of light and shadow on the cave walls within. The pavilion emanates a warm glow and linear texture due to the mesh of the woven glass fibres and the undulating lines of the interior wood grain. The Serpentine Wall creates a complex three-dimensional environment that can be explored and experienced in a variety of ways: inside and outside, on top and underneath. This simple manipulation of the archetypical space-defining element of the garden wall creates a presence in the park that changes as you move around it and through it. At the end of the term in its current location, the Pavilion is set to travel to several cities in Asia and America - purchased by the Canadian real estate developer, Westbank, the pavilion will spend most of its time abroad acting as host to public events and happenings. Given its lightweight modular components and construction method, the pavilion was designed to be both readily dismantled and reassembled. All elements of the pavilion are labelled on a coordinate system based on the row and column grid of the main structure. All components of the pavilion are bolted or joined by mechanical joints, making each one of the elements re-usable multiple times.